secret history II: of how the fairies came to be
by darklight ascendant
Summary: where did the fairies REALLY come from? why are they here? and watch as they try to save - no less - humanity. No canon characters yet. P AN: working on Aftermath and Exorcism concurrently. DO NOT EXPECT FREQUENT UPDATES.
1. Discovery

**secret history II: of how the fairies came to be.**

  


I: Discoveries.

  


_c._ A.D. 3600

LEP Central Command had become a very different place than Commander Julius Root, Captain Holly Short, or even Foaly the centaur could ever have imagined. After all, they were already many centuries dead.

The sanctum of the Underground's police force was now simply a hemispherical dome, several feet wide, its walls punctured at evenly spread points with the doors to various locations, above and under ground. It had been reconstructed since the great compound Caucus earthquake a thousand and five hundred years ago that had shook the earth and fragmented the entire continent of Antarctica. Now, it was a gleaming thing of translucent plastic opening to a view of solid bedrock. Half-solid, actually, allowing for the four massive fissures spreading through it that had been the result of the earthquake, making enough debris to bury the original LEP Central Command two miles under ground level.

In fact, it was the Council's meddling ways that had caused the Caucus earthquake. But of course, no Council member would ever admit it. And that's another story anyway.

There were concentric rings of work-desks from the perimeter of the dome walls to the center, each with a terminal at which the fairies could simply plug-in their hand-helds to do their work. At the outermost ring were the "contact" LEP, the ones the citizens interacted with, the menial workers of the LEP caste system. The floor ascended gently like the cone of a volcano, reaching the apex of a 10-degree incline right under the greatest height of the dome. Each ascending hierarchy of workers had less members and a more inner and higher-placed ring, right to the center where twenty-six chairs were placed around an imposing round conference table. But there were no cubicles or walls between workstations; there had been a consensus towards less privacy and better efficiency, and the wireless internal networking signals could not afford to be weakened by cubicle walls. The whole setup looked suspiciously like the way things had been at the Mud Men's NASA of old; but then again, no fairy had ever needed to be there.

But once in a while there would be the press of a button somewhere (which many suspected was big, bubbly and red) and a slow column of gleaming metal would arise from the groove surrounding the central circle. There would already be the leaders of LEP sitting there, and as the column came up to shield their conversations and them from the general view of the LEP, a slow hiss of spreading rumours would run the circumference of the rings.

And today, the column was up.

  


Within the central column of the LEP sanctum, the LEP Commanders and Captains had gathered. They could look through the material of the walls, translucent from the inside but opaque from the outside, to see the LEP hard at work preserving the world of the People. But when a crisis was so big that Aquinas, the Tech centaur, had to come personally from his R&D labs across Haven, it always seemed as if their work would never avail against the impending catastrophe.

"We cracked the code, Commander Root," Aquinas reported.

"What code?" Commander Octavius Root, as did most fairies living in these times, remembered nothing of the days when a 14-year-old Irish boy had held the keys to exposing the world of the People.

"We cracked the eternity code of the human, Artemis Fowl on the C Cube."

"Artemis? Fowl?"

"That reminds me vaguely of some chapter of History I studied as an elfling," Captain Nigel Kelp commented. "Wasn't he the great genius, the enemy of the People?"

"Yes. He had succeeded in creating a supercomputer from stolen LEP technology that was centuries ahead of the Mud Men's developmental schedule. He had sent a search for surveillance beams that broke through the LEP's defenses, meaning that the supercomputer held all the security data of the People. An unauthorized retrieval was made. But we were not able to access the data he had amassed, for the code he used had been coded to an eternity recombination of his vocal intonation sequences."

"And you broke the code," Commander Root's face turned a rosy shade of pink as his acrid fungus-cigar smoke filled the room. Both talents ran deep in the family. "SO WHAT, AQUINAS?" he roared. "DO YOU THINK YOU WERE COMMISSIONED TO WASTE THE PRECIOUS BUDGET OF THE L.E.P. AND OUR PRECIOUS TIME ON - "

"Hear him out," Council Representative Arch-mage Lotus Short pleaded.

" - on some stupid code a dangerous Mud Boy made up 1600 years ago?"

"The results of his probe have far-reaching repercussions to the People," Aquinas continued as if not interrupted. He allowed himself a little chuckle at the pun. Unfortunately, no one else in the room knew that it was one yet.

"Get on with it."

  


_...Though Artemis did not intend it, the Cube's scan for surveillance beams was to have far-reaching repercussions. The search parameters were so vague that the Cube sent probes into deep space, and of course, deep underground..._

  


"Most of the data that we retrieved was mundane," Aquinas continued, "including a full-scale description of the LEP surveillance system 1600 years ago. What a grand ancestry I've had. That centaur, Foaly. But what really concerns us today is this single data entry, recorded in full video."

A floating mist of water fog took on glowing color from a projector. There was a wall of empty space...

  


...The seed pod was semi-sentient. It pondered the query and considered what reply would fulfill its mission.

After a discussion at length between its various sentience subroutine processors, it sent back a reply. _We are watching._ The walls of the seed pod de-opaqued for just the instant needed to record its contents...

  


Space and a wall of stars, and a grey made thing, a cube slowly spinning about its geometric centre. There was a random burst of white electric sparks across the striations of its textured surface, and then a deep, gravelly voice like an easily-angered, irritable demigod: _"We are watching."_ Then another burst of sparks, but these ordered in their sweep from one corner of the cube to its opposite corner, a grid feet wide on square faces miles across that made the walls transparent where it had passed. Then - 

A deep and ominous emptiness within the cube.

"You called us here to watch a big empty box?" Root was irritated, driven by anger – but now also a little fear.

"Wait," Aquinas pressed a little switch on his wristband computer. "Voice command input. Pause visual. Re-center on memory-determined point bit xx8149FA300. Zoom in. Scale factor 10. Scale factor 20."

A few grains of... something, appeared in one corner as Aquinas sharpened the zoom.

"Scale factor 1000. Scale factor 100000. Parallax compensation off. Memory bitmap search..."

The view panned across the vastly magnified area, spiraling as if working in a search pattern for - 

"There."

Eight figurines, still so small they looked like toys.

The first person to decipher the images sprung forth from his chair, as if some prank-sprite had put a pin in it. "D'Arvit!" was all he could say before he sank back into his chair with a vicious muttering.

Aquinas gave no commentary until every member there had figured it out for themselves, each similarly shell-shocked.

"An elf, a gnome, a pixie, a sprite, a dwarf, a centaur, a troll, and a goblin. A mini-portrait of the People, framed in an alien thing hovering 400 solar systems from Earth."

"What... what does this mean?" Even Commander Root had surrendered his scarlet complexion in the moment's power.

"Friends, we People are not of this Earth."


	2. Discs

**secret history II: of how the fairies came to be.**

  


II: Discs

  


A.D. 2000+

Artemis Fowl II had been perverse in his teenage years. There could be no doubt of it.

Companies that came to power on a wave of environmental destruction suddenly found themselves destroyed. Sometimes it was simply a few billion, siphoned out of accounts daily, disappearing each day until the debts were too great. At other times, a CEO would have been seen to commit a crime, and the sting that brought him or her down would have to be almost as elaborate as the one Artemis Fowl II had used to set him or her up. It had been an era of glory for the Fowls, a generation of conscientious looting.

There had been casualties. His parents had been mowed down by an unmarked Ferrari on vacation in New Zealand. They had not always enjoyed vacations together; it was only their fourth. Artemis Fowl II, then just 16, did not grieve at the funeral. There was none; but with tears in his eyes, he consigned them to two cryo pods. But of course the word on the grapevine was that he had called for the Ferrari as well.

He had not recalled such faith in cryogenics, something he once saw as mumbo-jumbo. Another vestige of a few years' memory gaps.

  


One night a haggardly stooped man came to the front door of Fowl Manor. It opened. Unfortunately for the dwarf, the target of Artemis' then-running plan was supposed to arrive right where he stood, two minutes later.

So it was natural for Butler to greet Mulch with a bullet to the heart instead of a handshake. A case of mistaken identity sealed the door to Artemis' past.

  


_c. _A.D. 3600

Artemis Fowl sat forlornly in the hall of Fowl Manor.

Of course the great criminal lord, Artemis Fowl II was dead, lost in the annals of countless Fowl geniuses. The point had come when it was useless to put those Roman numerals on the names; Artemis Fowl XXXVIII abolished it. So Artemis Fowl was glad not to be XL, the fortieth. He could safely be called Artemis, for his father's name was Julius.

Artemis sat forlornly in the hall, staring at the strange stuffed – person? - in one corner. The little thing was barely five feet tall. Yet it looked almost human. He remembered reading about how the scientists had been stupefied by its physiology.

"Its metabolism appears to be driven by consumption of minerals and humus," the scientists had noted. "The cellular structure appears rather homogeneous with typical land life expectations, but its DNA strands are wound in a quintuple helix. Doubtless this means that cellular reproduction is generally slower and this creature's lifespan could well have been two millennia. Still, we have no clues how this find should be related to current evolutionary theory."

He had always wondered about it. Why had the great ancestor chosen to stuff and embalm this... thing? It was an extraordinary work of taxidermy indeed, but there could not have been any logic about the decision. The body had kept its pose over the years, rigor mortis freezing its left hand into what seemed like a friendly wave. Its eyes opened wide, as if expecting some reward, and its hairs stood on edge. But its right hand was clenched around some strange golden medallion.

Today, as Artemis watched it, he suddenly saw a little flake of something golden fall from its right hand. And another. There had already been an unnoticed pile of little golden flakes below the hand, mocking like some pile of unraked leaves. So Artemis went to see.

Golden the medallion was not. As Artemis tried to prise open the frozen fingers, he was drawn to the medallion they held. It looked gold-plated, but underneath all that false glitter was the translucent green of an ancient laser disc. Suddenly, a sound of perspex breaking echoed throughout the hall and five dwarven fingers clattered to the floor. Grimly, Artemis took the disc and went to find one of those obsolete laser disc players.

Mulch had done what he came for, finally.

  


  


  


"...wait. There's more."

Aquinas always hated it when meetings were this long. It simply meant less of what he said would go into the LEP's collective head.

"We've analysed the construction material. The thing's physically impossible. Thin as an atom. Only neutrons compacted together; the electrons have apparently crashed into the protons and been absorbed. The positron neutrino signature is still there. Damn material was carved from a neutron star."

The room was in silence. A few of them couldn't believe Aquinas. The rest couldn't understand Aquinas.

But he carried on. "The material's a hundred times as strong as steel."

Now they were all ears. Commander Birch Greenham, head of military production, started wondering aloud about estimated material licensing costs. Telephone-number figures.

"The consistency's same throughout. Well, almost throughout. Except for this area."

The visual was still being displayed on the floating fog screen. "Re-center on memory-determined point bit xx469E4F100. Memory bitmap search two." As if the camera was soaring like an eagle, over the surfaces of the enigmatic cube, the picture in the visual twisted and turned. The general effect it had on the viewers was that of nausea. Thankfully, the visual stilled in two minutes, on a singular square sparkling amongst translucent grey. "It's a hatch, a thing of crystalline carbon that's about .36% as strong as the surrounding material. It's placed geometrically opposite the figurines, and right in between them is an optical disc."

Birch asked, "What's crystalline carbon?"

"Diamond."

Commander Root had had enough. "D'Arvit, so there's a neutron star ship out there with a diamond door, a bunch of toy People and a lousy CD!" His complexion had regained a full-bodied redness and his spittle was forming dangerous projectiles. "So WHAT? What do you want me to do, D'Arvit? Next I know, you'll want me to SEND A TEAM up there to get your BLASTED CD from your stupid SPACESHIP!"

The silence carried a dangerous tone of assent.

"Aquinas, you are SO kidding."

"...Commander Root, I – was – just – about – to ...heehee." Aquinas would have put his hoof over his mouth, if it was physically possible. It takes a lot to reduce a centaur to "heehee". 

Commander Root ripped the casing off his wrist computer and mashed a virtual button, taking a few years off the touch-screen's lifetime. A small box floated out of the centre of the round table, with a button on it.

What do you know. It _was_ big, bubbly and red.

  


"Please hear Aquinas out!"

Arch-mage Short's voice could be heard over the jarring noise the bright metallic column made as it rolled back into its groove. The walls of the inner conference hall were descending, and the roar of the ensuing arguments resounded through the gap between the column and the dome. Instantly, every head in the LEP sanctum turned towards the central area. As soon as the column was fully back in its groove, the 26 council members could be seen almost at fisticuffs. Commander Root was the first to huff off down the central corridor to the exits.

"What are you gaping at! Get back to your work in 10 seconds or you won't HAVE no work!"

Nobody bothered pointing out Root's double negative. Thankfully, or an artery might have burst in his brain. The other council members started walking away from the heated arguments, leaving only Lotus Short, Nigel Trouble and Aquinas behind. 

"But someone has to go get that disc," Aquinas was oblivious to the meeting's collapse in the stupor of being refused.

Lotus took a pitying stare at Nigel. "We'll continue this meeting some other day," she said, before walking lightly away. Nigel sighed. Gods knew how long it would take Octavius to cool down, after a request like that.

Fairies in space...


	3. Space Programmes

**secret history II: of how the fairies came to be**

  


III: Spaceflight Programmes

  


Centaurs had always been retiring creatures. It was true, they were things of the plains in the golden days of the fairies' peaceful coexistence with the humans. But it had never suited them. Now that they lived underground, there was no need for social discomfort to bow before physical necessity. For of course, they would have chosen the forests or the mountains, if they could have, but centaurs' hooves did not take kindly to such places.

Living in the great road-plains had brought them into contact with all the races and tribes. Such regular inter-mingling with others, coupled with the centaurs' instinctual brooding and intellectuality, resulted in a race of technological superbiage. If you wanted anything invented or improved, go to the centaurs. But their vital role in the Underground civilization had never removed their basic nature.

But a _centaur_ in a covert operation? Now that was something.

  


Aquinas' softscreen showed a schematic of a Saturn V rocket, rapidly filling with lines going here and there showing all the parts. "Now look. To escape the Earth's gravity well with a chemical rocket, one needs a ninety percent mass fraction. Nine parts fuel to one part payload by mass. A typical elf weighs about thirty kilograms. A hermetic space suit with complementary life-support systems, rad-hardened protection and semi-closed mass loops, about twenty kilograms. So the fuel required is about 450 kilograms, 480 to include local maneuvering thrust. But once you get up into space? Weightless." Aquinas laughed to himself, but Lotus and Nigel did not get the joke. It was not a normal thing for a fairy to know the human civilization well; then again, Aquinas was not a normal centaur.

"450 kilos of combustible to get a fairy into space?" Lotus wondered. "No wonder the humans never got any real space programme off the ground."

"Of course, that's with chemical rockets, hydrogen-lox – liquid oxygen – burners, etcetera. Childrens' toys. What they don't have is cold fusion." Aquinas' softscreen rebooted its monitor, putting up a new display of an elf with three fuel tanks strapped on its back. "This is new stuff, invented just over two hundred and fifty years ago. With fusion fuel we can jack the mass fraction all the way down to sixty. Six parts deuterium-helium-lithium colloid gel to four parts payload. Our fairy now needs about 75 kilograms of fusile – fusion-able – material. With a Moonbelt setup, about 12 kilograms by weight."

The two elves and the centaur were huddled in Nigel's living room, the only supporters of Aquinas' crazy scheme to send elves into space. It had all gone to the chutes after Aquinas' less-than-satisfactory presentation, just over a week ago. Commander Root's outburst had caused many to side with him, and those who hadn't were none too keen either to join a space programme less than a month old. They had accused him of birthing a premature technology – never mind that the Mud Men had sent their men into space since the day of airflight. Those Mud Men were stupid anyway, stupid worthless waterbags depriving the People of their rightful habitat. The racism that had began since the days of the Artemis wars had long since escalated into a hard shell of aloofness, resentment and xenophobia, the way a man might regard the ants joining and ruining his picnic.

Of course, the space programme suffered too from the stigma of being associated with the Mud Men.

"The best part of it is, the fusile residue is also combustible. Worth about an extra hundred kilograms of ordinary combustible chemical fuel. So there's no problem with getting a fairy into space."

"What about propulsion systems? Wouldn't fuel be worthless without a rocket to burn it?" Nigel was more than a little skeptical himself, though he did not know it, but he told himself that he was pushing Aquinas to think faster through the scheme.

"Well, the necessary machinery has been in place for millenia, actually. Our current flight systems are perfectly capable of entering space. The Hummingbird models are rocket-plane hybrids, made practical by the use of fissile, then fusile energy sources. It would take just a bit of modification to add in vacuum navigation, nothing more than a week to two engines. The basic component of escaping Earth's gravity well has long since been in place. You should remember that flying in itself is simply resisting the Earth's gravity for ascending to a desired altitude. Spaceflight is nothing more than a logical extension of that."

"Why are you so keen on going up there, anyway?"

"Because, Lotus, I am _discontented_. I don't like how things are going here. Hear this: ' Frontiers are the forcing ground for democracy and inventiveness. In a closed world, science is strangled by patent laws and other protective measures, and technological innovation is restricted to decadent entertainment systems and the machinery of war. It is a vicious cycle, of course; only smartness can get humanity out of this trap of closure, but smartness is the very thing that has no opportunity to grow...' Like that? Maura Della, US Vice-President, quoted by Stephen Baxter, renowned science fiction writer and novelist. Both Mud Men. They have caught up quickly. Without some form of advancement, we will be swamped. We have lost the physical advantage long ago. Now, our mental advantage, the advancement given us over a million years aboveground, is quickly waning too. When they have caught up there, it will be too late for us." Aquinas stirred; a speech that had gestated for far too long in his mind was finally finding expression.

"I do not hate them, those Mud Men. They are earning the right to shed that title, too; with all their work to restore the world. They have seeded ozone formation at the Poles, reforested the barren lands of the temperates – do you know that the world has never had a larger land percentage of carbon sinks? Not even in our days did we do that. They have even rebred the long ago extinct species; there are two species viably breeding today for every species _alive_ a millenium ago, thanks to their genetic regeneration programme. What advantage do we have left over them? We don't even have the _right_ to remain on this planet, reclusive stowaways in its rocky belly."

Lotus was stunned. Nigel took a while and digested Aquinas' outburst. "So that is what you are trying to do? Redeem the People?"

"No, even better. I am trying to find our _purpose_. Far too long we have – "

Suddenly Aquinas' softscreen began glowing soft silver. It was an alert, but – "I've never seen that one before," commented Lotus, and her bewilderment was genuine. She did spend a lot of time in the Tech booth, becoming quite technologically advanced herself – though she would admit, with much shame, that it was not entirely for professional reasons that she had had this training.

"Yes, a tech alert," Aquinas said softly, as if in a dream. A nightmare, exactly. "Every time the humans make a considerable improvement in their technology." He was too preoccupied for complete sentences, punching in a sequence of commands to clear the tint and reveal the offensive piece of news.

He took a deep breath. "By the gods," he exhaled slowly.

"What is it?"

"Quantum technology." Aquinas whispered, as if he was the only one listening. "While we, living where the very surroundings were minerals, never cared about such small things. It's the obvious end result of repeated bouts of miniaturisation. But never large-scale. Never like this... Lotus, Nigel, they've discovered _quantum propulsion_. There's going to be no end. Something like quantum propulsion may not endanger us directly, but as their field of study deepens and widens, there will be new weapons. New construction materials. They may even discover us. And when they do," he took a deep breath, "they will most probably destroy us. And, it may be no more than what we deserve."


	4. Stellar Acuity

**Disclaimer:** NOW that I'm venturing into Stephen Baxter's territory, I'll start with the disclaimers. The GUTdrive, GUTships, and the opening of the solar system are Stephen Baxter's. Michael Poole is his too, but most of Poole's smart-mouth comments are mine. Holly Short, Trouble Kelp, Julius Root, Foaly, and Artemis Fowl II are Eoin's, but they don't appear in this story. The LEP is his, though. Holly's brother is mine. (But he doesn't appear in this story either.) Lotus Short, Nigel Kelp, Octavius Root, Aquinas, and Artemis Fowl the Fortieth (Artemis Fowl) are mine. But who cares what is whose?!

**secret history II: of how the fairies came to be**

IV: Stellar Acuity

_c._A.D. 3600

            "Butler, how many beggars did we pass on the way here?"

            "I lost count, sir."

            "You lost count?"

            But Butler did not respond. That was a question he could not answer. He knew that of the five hundred and ninety-two they had passed, his master despised each and pitied none. That was how rich children grew.

            He was accompanying his father to an important meeting. Julius (A/N: Fowl, mind you) had called it a convention; Artemis disagreed, thinking it more an expo – an exposition, for there was only one thing there worth seeing. He never spoke up, though. Silence and compliance was a small price to pay for unending riches.

            For the Fowl family was the richest family in Ireland, all of the United Kingdom, and some said the entire Western hemisphere. It was relatively easy for a corporation helmed by the great Artemis Fowl the Second to become a global juggernaut, especially with almost half a ton of gold as capital. Those he could not outcompete – a privileged few – the succeeding generations of Fowls had bought up one by one. The only economic field left ripe for plunder was the Eastern world, with its rapidly rising stock.

            And they said this was the man behind it.

            Michael Poole stepped up to the podium within the grand convention hall. It easily fit twenty-five thousand people on a good day; but today was not a good day, and even with dignitaries willing to share two chairs to three people, the hall was packed and overflowing. So important, that man was. But Artemis' solitary question was, _Who is he?_ For Artemis had not been one to pay interest to news and daily events. The name, had he known it, would not have been matched with a face. Poole was not an imposing man: short, stocky, and with a thickly obscuring accent that Artemis settled on describing mentally as a cross between the accents of an American and an overdrive guitar. His pale white pate shone with reflected light, and Artemis imagined that if he jumped, the remaining strands of whitening hair would flop up and down with a childish indignity.

            "Mankind has dreamt of the stars for ages. And today, more than ever, they are within the reach of our grubby hands…"

            "Tell me exactly why I am here?"

            "Lotus, you know that I can't trust my data mining programs anymore. They are far too inefficient. Centuries of isolation from the humans has left it dry of data with which I can optimize their searches."

            "So you send a scouting team into an unsecured hostile area. How pleasant of you."

            "Well, bearing responsibility for the continued superiority of the People's technology is not pleasant."

            "I still don't understand though."

            Lotus and Nigel hovered at twice head-height in the cramped hall, shielded, watching the unfolding show as Michael Poole kept talking onstage. "How," Nigel asked again, "did the Mud Men catch up on us?"

            "Our technological expansions rapidly reached their limit. You know that our ionic modulation technologies have only ever been able to exploit the inherent chemical properties of the 92 naturally occurring elements – "

            "Shhh," Lotus said.

            _"…stars. Yes, stars. Those big flaming balls out there, with unlimited space for humanity to grow and mature. Interstellar exploration has never been plausible. Even today, it is still a thing of the future. But now it is more than just a pipe dream, the interminable ranting of the science-fiction geeks. Now it is…"_

_            "We didn't come here to hear you yap, Mike, we came to see you fly."_

Laughter throughout the hall. _"Fine. But we have to go, if not to the stars, at least throughout the Solar system. Another small step for mankind."_

_            "Yeah, getting out of the way of the next big rock."_

_            "The next dino killer. Maybe it's wandering in on its way from the Belt right now, with all our names written on it." _A pause for dramatic effect, gaining none. _"But hey, enough of my propagandizing. I'm not here for your votes, just your beer money, right?" _More laughter. More prattle.

            "…who have had to deal with limited resources on a finite ground surface, forcing their technology out of a punctuated-asymptotic trending rut – "

            "Aquinas, I hate to say this, but between you and Mike, he's the nicer geek," Lotus suppressed a giggle.

            Artemis suppressed a yawn. He was annoyed when his father had laughed along with the rest of the hall to Michael's lousy jokes. So he looked up, twiddling his fingers.

            _"But quantum physics has taken a quantum leap – "_ a little laughter, then embarrassed silence – _"since the days of frizz-haired Einstein and E equals emm cee squared. General relativity is a kids' toy now since the high-dimensional approximations and mature M-theory have come around. I can't tell you exactly how this works, for much of it can't even be described in words. Any more than I'm telling you now and you'd al go psycho. But basically we've managed to throw some order into chaos in a certain application of the Kelvin-Riemann complex parametry by imposing a Skibosh matrix on some sixth-order dimensionality variables..."_

            Artemis stifled a laugh. He _was_ Arnold Skibosh, a pseudonym thrown up over the Internet to conceal the fact that the world's top expert on semi-chaotic quantum logic was a 14-year-old boy.

            _"Wasn't that crystal clear? Simply put, the compression chamber at the heart of this revolutionary drive technology compresses low amounts of mass at enormous densities to form a complex mix of protons, electrons and force-carrying particles, which approximates the near-Big Bang state of the universe where our Grand Unified Theory holds, allowing us to liberate great amounts of kinetic energy with complex quantum interactions."_

            Michael was beginning to sound interesting. How had the matrix led Michael to such a disparate – but was that patch of ceiling funny?

            There was a cloth covering a big box in the center of the grand stage. "Hey, Aquinas."

            "But aren't we overdue for such a revolutionary – "

            "AQUINAS!"

            "Wha – yes, Lotus?"

            "Can you scan that cloth thing there?"

            "Actually, that was the first thing I scanned when you entered. Can't penetrate. At any radiation frequency. That thing looks practically impervious – "

            When it slipped out of the cloth. And before the audience had time to process the event, the cloth had sagged to the ground, not in the slightest bit dragged by the box – that _thing_ – that had effortlessly glid across the stage. Before the audience had time to gasp, the box was now behind Michael at the far right of the stage, and as it stopped, the shock wave of its movement pushed Michael into the podium.

            "Whoa. Did you see that? That was a psol speed – "

            "Psol? Aquinas, some English?"

            "Percent speed of light. I can't believe it. That thing has _forty_ psol. "

            "Some perspective?"

            "The old airspeed record, held by Julius Root, is just 0.6 psol."

            The elves were struck speechless. Below, Michael recovered and spoke into the mike, _"Ladies and gentlemen, the GUTdrive."_ Wild applause from the audience, who had never imagined anything could move that fast, not even Superman.

            But suddenly Nigel found reason to speak again. "Aquinas, who's that boy?"

            "Oh, him? Hmm… what do you know? He's a descendant of the great Artemis Fowl, forty generations down the line."

            "Great? Don't you mean – "

            "Shh, Lotus, don't look now, but _he's staring at us._"


End file.
